M.2 SSD PCIe NVMe Review (Samsung V-NAND SSD 950 Pro)

What exactly makes computer users fall in love with a storage technology called SSD? Maybe similar to the transition from CD to flash at that time. This PCIe NVMe SSD technology offers read, write and media transfer processes that are much faster than standard SSDs. Efficiency, that’s the main selling point.

Day by day, of course, this SSD technology gets new touches. Starting from the shape, dimensions, interface, to performance. And what’s hot right now is, a touch of new performance in SSD storage products by utilizing a new interface.

M.2 PCIe SSD NVMe, What the heck?

For those who have not followed the development of SSDs, you may also be embarrassed to read the naming of this one product. NVMe itself stands for Non-Volatile Memory Express. Which is actually a product that offers SSD-like capabilities. It’s just that it has lower latency performance and lower CPU usage as well as advantages in utilizing flash-based internal devices in parallel.

For that, let’s flashback a little about the interface used in previous SSD products. Like hard drives, early generation SSDs also take advantage of the SATA interface. It’s just that with the characteristics of the Flash chip that is able to provide read and write performance up to 10x. Well, NVMe makes the data transfer process even faster by utilizing the PCI Express V3 lane speed. Not only like PCI Express accessories that are often found on desktop PCs, NVMe uses a special PCI Express x4 lane which is usually only intended for Video Card lanes. On paper, NVMe can take advantage of the bandwidth of PCI Express V3 up to 4 x 985Mbps or about 3.9Gbps.

Terms of Utilizing PCIe NMVe SSD

Because this technology is still very new, it certainly requires several conditions so that our hardware can recognize and take advantage of the capabilities of the PCIe SSD NVMe. What needs to be remembered, NVMe was born from the limitations of SATA and AHCI technology which is difficult to handle the speed of NAND Flash. Initially, this NVMe technology was only used among entrepreneurs and servers which incidentally had to serve many users.

To be able to use this technology, there are 3 conditions that must exist on our PC or laptop. First, of course, a PCIe slot or an M.2 slot on a laptop because generally, this type of slot can be made with two functions, SATA and PCIe. Although the type of M.2 slt that supports PCIe is slightly different. Second, the operating system that supports this technology of course. At first, only windows 8.1 and windows server 2003 had drivers for NVMe solutions. But now, Windows 10, Windows 7 to Linux can also take advantage of this technology.

Last but not least is the PCIe SSD NVMe itself. Physically, at first glance, it is similar to a SATA SSD with the NGFF 2280 form factor. However, it is different in the connector section where the NVMe SSD has 2 copies. For those of you whose laptop has an M.2 slot but doesn’t support NVMe yet, don’t ever experiment to try to install an NVMe SSD into it.

Advantages of PCIe NVMe SSDs – Good Bye RAID?

With the theory mentioned above, PCIe NVMe SSD promises a new throughput that can be aligned with two SSDs in RAID 0. You can imagine, with one SSD with NVMe technology, we can say goodbye to RAID technology. Similar to SATA SSDs, capacity also affects the speed of NVMe SSDs. We will discuss this at another time, pemmzholics.

note: The test was taken using the Xenom Siren SR14S unit

Also read: Xenom Siren SR14S Review

With the performance on offer, it is not wrong if gaming laptop products that have adopted Intel Skylake are also competing to highlight this feature. For some products, such as MSI gaming laptops with additional killer network options, for example, they promise a much more perfect online gaming experience. Naturally, MSI’s flagship Super RAID feature, was directly developed using this technology. And according to MSI claims, two NVMe SSDs combined with the Super RAID 4 feature are able to provide throughput of up to 3.3GB. I’m more curious about this pemmzchannel review of MSI GT72S or MSI GT80.

Conclusion

Then, is this NVMe SSD technology worth buying? We take one example, the Samsung V-Nand 950 Pro 256GB NVMe SSD as of this writing at a price of 3.4 million rupiah (13,500/GB). Where at the same time, an mSATA SSD or M.2 SATA with the same capacity is priced at 1.4 million (± 5500/GB). Now there is a price difference of 8,000 rupiah per GB or the price per GB of the NVMe SSD is 145% more expensive. Now let’s look at some performance test scenarios where the average NMVe SSD is almost 200% faster than a SATA-based SSD.

Now with the example of the price vs performance comparison above, for the pemmzchannel team whose activities are a lot in and out of triple-A games, upgrading to an NVMe SSD is certainly very feasible and will be very helpful, especially when in-game. Because as we all know, the current data file for triple-A games is no longer friendly to the performance of standard SSDs, let alone HDDs. So, if you are a gamer, investing in a pemmzchannel NVMe SSD guarantees you won’t be disappointed in the slightest.

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